I remember, had such a choice when a defender as good as Steve Bruce never got a look in for England.
Internationals October (Euro Qualifiers + Friendlies)
- Thread starter Samid
- Start date
Absolutely shocking performance from England. Henderson and Rice are useless. Rashford - didn't do anything and all his crosses were rubbish. Mount was completely anonymous. Barkley, Kane and Sterling were decent in patches. Sancho didn't do enough and the entire defence was rubbish. Pickford made good saves but wtf was he doing with his footwork
Terrible performance for Felix, playing for Simeone has been great for him I guess...
Next game in Ukraine 1 point is enough, they are more disciplined than Serbia.
Next game in Ukraine 1 point is enough, they are more disciplined than Serbia.
Used to have Terry and Ferdinand! Now have a bunch of clowns.
Griezman is a fecking cnut.
Watching Rice and Henderson tonight made me (and probably Mount) realise just how good we've got it with Jorginho and Kante aswell as Kova as a back up.
And how much of a genius Klopp is competing at the very top with an average midfield.
And how much of a genius Klopp is competing at the very top with an average midfield.
Jeez, can it get any worse for English Manchester United fans this weekend? Don't go killing yourselves or anything. We need to keep as many supports as we can these days!
I can’t see many being too bothered.
Fabinho is a top player, Wijnaldum is very good too.
That was like watching us at the moment, absolutely dire. Midfield was a joke if that’s the best we can produce at the mo.
Henderson>Jorginho.
I'd play him, but not as the DM in a 433
The only good player for us tonight was Kane. Some of his hold-up and playmaking was pornographic and he did a lot of work pressing at the start of the game and defending towards the end.
Sterling was back to the old England Sterling, which is why I think it's still too early to say that he's overtaken Kane. Sancho was scarce but made the cardinal mistake of not showing for the ball while we were pinned in at the back, unlike Kane and Sterling. But for all that, our attack can't really take much blame. All of our highlights were slick attacking moves started, mostly, by Kane.
The defence was utterly dire. It has been dire for some time now and we've finally been exposed for it. Props to the Czechs.
Ultimately, though, even more than the defence, our midfield was just absent. With a competent midfield, our world class attack can outscore opponents, but without a midfield, we rely on keeping the score down and this defence will always get mugged off. I've never been sold on the Henderson and Rice combo, which I've always found static and terribly uncreative, but if they can't even cover the defence, what the hell are they doing as first choice.
The story of England: one of the very best attacks in world football restrained by the mediocrity behind them.
Sterling was back to the old England Sterling, which is why I think it's still too early to say that he's overtaken Kane. Sancho was scarce but made the cardinal mistake of not showing for the ball while we were pinned in at the back, unlike Kane and Sterling. But for all that, our attack can't really take much blame. All of our highlights were slick attacking moves started, mostly, by Kane.
The defence was utterly dire. It has been dire for some time now and we've finally been exposed for it. Props to the Czechs.
Ultimately, though, even more than the defence, our midfield was just absent. With a competent midfield, our world class attack can outscore opponents, but without a midfield, we rely on keeping the score down and this defence will always get mugged off. I've never been sold on the Henderson and Rice combo, which I've always found static and terribly uncreative, but if they can't even cover the defence, what the hell are they doing as first choice.
The story of England: one of the very best attacks in world football restrained by the mediocrity behind them.
Yeah he's not all that.
Never understood how Henderson has made such a good living from the game.
Czechs did well to make England uncomfortable and passed the ball well. The England players didn't fancy getting stuck in to match them psychically.
Incredible that people still float this idea of Liverpool's midfield being poor.
With the Nations League playoffs it's even more likely you'll make it to a tournament.yes, outplayed Serbia at home as well a month ago. A good mix of experience and youngsters, some players are playing in Ukraine, Russia, Sweden and even the Bundesliga. The goals and wins have increased over the years. They arent a joke anymore, far better than most think. We will be at a big tournament soon with a bit of group luck, i can feel it
I was very impressed tonight, you deserved a goal. I'm actually a bit scared that we lose in Ukraine now since then we'd need a win on the last matchday away in Luxembourg.
On the plus side, Kane was good in that floating CAM #10 role. All of our best attacks went through him.
In general, as an England supporter, I'm gutted though. I guess at least it makes our ten-year 44 game unbeaten qualifying streak more interesting... Stretching for that silver-lining.
England may have lost but they only have themselves to blame with their woeful finishing. Sterling (who seems to have gone back to his old days in front of goal), Sancho and Kane should have done a lot better with their chances. That front 3 is top class but the problem arises when you've got someone like Rashford coming in as your main threat off the bench.
Klopp is a genius. I'm more pissed off with the Rice love in on here though. The guy is so bang average he wouldn't even improve our midfield by much. Somehow people think he is the man to go for though.
I agree to an extent. For all the people moaning about the defence and the midfield - we had 3 or 4 chances that were clear opportunities to score and we fluffed them.
Why losing your nerves, England just baiting now, when real thing starts, they will wipe the floor with rest of Europe.
Marcus Rashford completed more tackles (2) in 18 minutes as a striker than Keane, Rose, Henderson and Rice combined (1).
Yup. On another day Kane definitely connects with the ball over the top or the Barkley pass and scores atleast one of those and Sterling, with any sort of composure, would do a lot better as well. Even though England were subpar, they created enough chances to win this match.
2% is also probably his success rate when it came to crosses. Amazing ability to not beat the first man. England need a better first option off the bench than Rashford.
Since he can’t score goals, maybe we should try converting him to a battling midfielder like Alan Smith, maybe the Herrera replacement is already at the club.
Pogba
McTominay
Rashford
Feck that. Have him play CB and put Lindelof in the middle if we re gonna be adventurous.
To be fair, that was just great goalkeeping. Kane's first touch to take it round the keeper was good but Vaclik read the situation extremely well. If Vaclik hadn't positioned himself right in front of Kane, denying him any kind of angle, it would've been a tap in for a world class finisher. I suspect the only way Kane could've scored with Vaclik rushing out smartly would've been to take the shot on first time, which would've made it more of a half-chance.
And that leads me into a bit of a ramble, not necessarily aimed at you but using your post as a launchpad...
Kane should've done better with the air shot but that's the only big chance he had apart from the pen IMO. It's forgivable because he was so involved in the rest of our attacking play. It wasn't like one of the recent qualifiers where Sterling was doing the build-up and Kane just had to be clinical (which, to be fair, he was). Every threatening move we had tonight started with Kane or otherwise went through him. The pen came from an inch-perfect first time ball into the path of Sterling.
Kane might have been nominally (or numerically, hm) our 9 but he was playing a sort of CAM role, as he very often does for Southgate, with two or even all three of the line "behind" him more advanced in possession. After it became obvious that our forward pipeline was broken, match conditions forced him to drop even deeper, essentially into central midfield, which has been a common pseudo-tactical (mis)use of Kane for a long time now. Him dropping incredibly deep to see any ball has been a far too frequent sight for far too long.
Kane's hold-up and playmaking are superior to that of most players so he gets put further back in the forward pipeline, despite it not being his native or strongest position, to compensate for the shortcomings of others. This happens in the ailing Spurs diamond all the time: the formation only benefits Son playing on the shoulder of the last defender, while Kane is out of his ideal position and made to build from deep. That's the curse of being very good at most aspects of football. I've called it the paradox of Kane: ideally, both Spurs and England would want a clone of Kane creating for Kane but whilst cloning is not included in FIFA's Laws of the Game, managers have to make a decision over which Kane they want or need most.
Unfortunately, managers tend to be greedy with their best players and both Southgate and Poch sometimes seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. Sometimes it almost seems like they make cardinal mistakes of football fans in thinking they can give their main goalscorer a playmaking role and still reap their main goalscorer's bounty of goals. It's a simple yet apparently oft-forgotten notion that the guy who starts your attacks is rarely going to be the guy finishing them, and - as tonight's performance perfectly illustrates - both are equally important, despite the headlines.
I've recently spotted a common mistake of expecting Kane to still score like he did when he was a pure 9 allowed to stay relatively fixed against the back line with a team capable of servicing him there. He no longer has either of those things at Spurs or at England, so he has to play a grab bag of roles and positions from striker to CM. The benchmark for a good Kane performance has changed accordingly and now it's much more subtle: at the moment, he's doing a bit of everything and the majority of what he does is just not high-impact CF play anymore. His selfish days are long gone - a lot of Spurs supporters actually want him to be more selfish - and in struggling teams, he makes everyone around him look better at his own expense. I firmly believe that a lot of people won't fully understand what Kane does for both of his teams until after a long-term absence (e.g. most of a season) when the sample size will be there to bear out the difference with sufficient statistical power.
Regardless, even on a night like tonight, where Kane's elite passing variety, accuracy, and vision was on full display in a manner obvious to anyone looking for his contributions, some will look only to a missed chance as the sum of his game, because that's what he used to be and, by number, putative position and reputation, still is -- even though he's not.
We created some chances tonight -- some good chances. But we conceded more. For any argument that we could've killed off the game, the same thing applies moreso to the Czech Republic. All else being equal, our strikers with their chances would've won. The shot stats don't do justice to just how much better their chances actually were.
We all know that the quality in our team is very much front-loaded and I saw nothing in the Czech game to counter that idea. Our highlights were all passages of interplay between the front 4. It wasn't like our forwards were wasting tons of ball or even sitting comfortably in front of a compact defence trying to break them down. Our forwards didn't see anywhere near enough of the ball.
In our previous matches, no matter how unremarkable our midfield has been, the forward pipeline has worked to the point of providing our strike force something to work with, for better or worse. Against the Czech Republic, we completely lost the midfield battle: they went through ours like they weren't there and ours struggled severely to transition into attack. Our crab-passing line of possession was deeper than it's been in any match so far, which would've been acceptable if our midfield was particularly defensive, but they couldn't even screen the defence effectively, let alone push the ball forward reliably.
Whether our attack could've been more clinical with their limited opportunities is largely immaterial. The game highlighted our dependence on offence as defence: a gaping hole that needs to be fixed quite apart from anything else. Against lesser opponents, we rely on our ability to hold the ball very high up the pitch to avoid exposing our defence to any risk whatsoever and on our ability to outscore them with our top-heavy attack when they do break through. These are not tactics that work against the best teams or any team able to dominate possession against you.
Throughout the campaign, we've been shipping one here, three there against what is mid-tier opposition in Europe. The fact that we've been able to outscore everyone to win has papered over the cracks and made us forget - or lose focus - on the fact that conceding in every match is a terrible idea for a team with ambitions of winning a major tournament. Every time the Czechs came at us, we looked like conceding. Every corner for them looked horribly dangerous for us.
But our defence being shit is not some revelation: our unusually poor midfield performance - in which our MF was outright bad instead of the usual adequate mediocrity - only helped uncover a phenomenon we've been hiding. (I don't think the defenders individually are particularly shit; I just don't think they've got any group chemistry, and collective organisation beats individual skill within a defensive unit)
I don't really know what was up with our midfield. Henderson and Rice are static, uncreative and technically lacking together, but they typically do a job against lesser opposition. You're supposed to know what you're getting with those two but that wasn't the case tonight. I can't imagine that Mount coming in caused some kind of sea change in the MF and I certainly didn't see one. Likewise, the minor positional shift should not have been a problem for this group of players (and we're in serious trouble if it was).
It's worrying that a performance like this seemingly came out of nowhere, without mass changes to the personnel or system. The XI (behind the front 4, I suppose) against Czech Republic didn't look like one that had ever met before. Maybe the match was just a random blip: an inexplicable confluence of factors that generated a perfect storm. The Czechs deserve credit for playing some very good football and never settling for the draw - they got their reward - but I have to believe it's not the case that their players are just too good for ours.
Tonight's performance, from our perspective, was less than the sum of its parts. Theirs was far more. And ultimately the sum is all that matters. Congrats to any Czechs here.
The way Czech played was just superb, superb team performance. They didn't panic when England pressed and passed the ball so well. England also created few very good chances, the Sterling one when GK saved it, Sancho failed to control the ball, Kane was one on one with GK and also missed the chance created by Sterling. These were easy chances but the overall play was poor.
Midfield was the problem for England, maybe the combination was just wrong.
Midfield was the problem for England, maybe the combination was just wrong.
Apparently there were violent clashes in Prague?
Could you post a link to whoever is reporting that please?
It really depends. If we lose to Ukraine Serbia might catch us if we also draw Luxembourg, but Serbia will still play against Ukraine at home (they lost 5-0 in Ukraine).
In any case remember we still have the playoff anyway because we won the Nations League, although of course we should try to avoid that at all costs and theorically would be very disappointing to not be top 2 in this group.
But yes, Luxembourg has improved a lot in the last years, as well as luxembourgian football (see Dudelange in the last years).
It's not exclusive to Luxembourg, teams like Andorra, Liechtenstein and Malta are much better than they were and can get results here and there.
The only team that seems to be stagnated is San Marino.
England fans being violent?! No way.
Could be. I'm not that into British media, does those things get brushed?
I'm sure there's some of that. Also, football fans being drunk idiots is sadly not really "news".
When this kind of things happen here everybody mention Thatcher and his she dealt with it as a role moder.
Fair play to anyone getting this.
Anyone watching the Republic match pretty dire stuff.
Coming out to 80mins so might see an Ireland customary cross and headed goal...
Coming out to 80mins so might see an Ireland customary cross and headed goal...